PORTLAND, Ore -- Intel Corp says it has designed its firstprocessor built from the ground up for the "green" datacenters of thefuture, claiming a 70% increase in performance for the same energy consumption.The new E5-2600 also features a high-speed bi-directional ring encircling itsup to eight cores per socket connecting up to 20 Mbytes of cache, quad DDR3memory controllers, and 40-lanes of PCI-Express 3 for input/output (I/O).
"The E5 is our first CPU optimized for theenergy-efficient datacenter of 2015," said Jeff Gilbert, Sandy Bridgearchitect. "It features twin 32-byte wide ultra-high-speed rings going inopposite directions to encircle the eight [Sandy Bridge] cores and connect themto cache."
The E5 family is also Intel's first server processor familywith integrated input/output (I/O), rather than using a separate chip, therebyreducing latency by 30% while doubling the bandwidth with PCIe3. The E5 is alsothe first Intel server processor to support LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) by virtueof industry's first integrated 10-Gbit per second Ethernet local-area network(LAN).
Intel also claims the E5 is its first processor optimizedfor a lowest idle power of 10 to 20% utilization. A sophisticated powermanagement agent puts separate power limits on the whole device, its cores,memory, and I/O, then smartly manages them for optimal performance, energyefficiency or other datacenter goals. Using dynamic switching, depending onload conditions and turbo requests, the E5 will automatically switch between"performance" and "low-power" modes plus a new"balance" mode that compensates for turbo requests by adjusting thevoltage/frequency of other cores.
For instance, if datacenter managers decide to clamp powerat a certain overall level, then the balance mode will adjust some cores downin voltage and frequency to compensate for the heavy load on a turbo-mode core.The new turbo 2.0 mode is also smarter on the E5, employing better thermalmanagement algorithms that keep track of how long a core has been held idlebuilding up "turbo credits" that can be used when over-clocking isinvoked.
Besides voltage and frequency scaling for each core, the newpower management agent also manages energy efficiency in I/O by dynamicallyreducing its width in response to workload and thermal management goals. Corepower can be scaled from 50-to-95 watts, which likewise scales memory latencyfrom 118-to-64 nanoseconds, while a "unicore" technique scales cacheand ring frequency to match.
In all, 23 different parameters are adjusted by the E5'srunning-average-power-limit architecture. As a result of optimizations enabledby Intel's Node- and Datacenter-Manager software, Intel estimates that up to40% more servers can be installed per rack using E5 processors.
This story was originally posted by EE Times.
